 Good morning and welcome to the first Unitarian Society of Madison. My name is Kelly and I'm one of the ministers here. Today I am joined by my colleague, the Reverend Kelly Crocker, and by the worship team of Linda Warren, Heather Thorpe, Drew Collins, and Daniel Karnes. The vision of FUS is growing souls, connecting with one another, and embodying our UU values in our lives, our community, and in our world. We are so glad to be able to connect with you virtually today, and we hope you will be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following our service. The information for joining can be found on the home page of our website, FUSMadison.org, as well as on the slide that will be seen again after the postlude. Our announcement slides will also be shown briefly after today's service, and we encourage you to take a moment and learn about upcoming programs and activities. And now I invite you to join me in a moment of silence to center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. The universe does not revolve around you. The stars and planets spinning through the ballroom of space dance with one another quite outside of your small life. You cannot hold gravity or seasons, even air and water inevitably evade your grasp. Why not then? Let go. You could move through time like a shark through water, neither restless or ceasing, absorbed in and absorbing the native element. Why pretend you can do otherwise? The world comes in at every pore, mixes in your blood before breath releases you into the world again. Did you think the fragile boundary of your skin could build a wall? Listen, every molecule is humming its particular pitch. Of course, you are a symphony whose tune do you think the planets are singing as they dance. I invite you now into joining in the words of affirmation printed on your screen as we light our chalice. Across the distance, the light from me within, the light from within me shines, sending love to all. Across the distance, your light is fuel that warms me and helps to keep my own light burning. Together, we keep the flame of community burning bright. Break not. By defeating many enemies, that is, by killing many enemies. But one day, war came to an end for the king and his country. There were no more battles to fight. And the king thought that he still needed to prove just how powerful he was so that his people would understand that they were safe under his protection. And so he began to take up hunting. He would go out into the countryside, into the wilderness, and find the most powerful animal that he could see. And he would kill it. This way, he would prove just how strong he was. Now, one day, the king and his hunting party were out in the forest. And away in the distance, he spied an Ibex. An Ibex, if you don't know what it is, is like a very large goat with just tremendously long horns that stretch all the way back over its body. It's a very powerful and impressive animal. And the king saw this. And he decided that he needed to kill that Ibex. But you see, at the same time, the king saw the Ibex. The Ibex saw the king. And it took off in the opposite direction, a full gallop, just hoofing it as fast as it possibly could, through the forest that it knew very well. And the king on his horse gave chase. And for a while, they raced between the trees as far away as the rest of the hunting party could even glimpse them. But the Ibex knew the forest well. And there was a place up ahead, as it was galloping along, where there was a natural sort of rift in the earth. And without even really thinking about it, it just leapt from one side to the other. Didn't break stride, kept right on going, but the king on his horse did not see the break in the ground. His horse did and stopped short. But the king tumbled head over heels and landed in that rift. He broke his leg. He was far enough away from the hunting party that it wasn't even certain that they could find him again, no matter how loudly he shouted, he lay there wondering what was going to become of him now. The Ibex was still running, but it looked back. It saw the riderless horse behind it, had some sense of what must have happened, and it stopped. It walked back to that rift in the earth, and it looked down to the king with his badly broken leg. The king looked up at the Ibex. They did not talk to each other exactly, but the king felt as though that Ibex had something to say to him. It hopped down from rock to rock, down to the base of that rift in the earth, where the king was lying helpless on the ground. It looked deeply into the eyes of the king, and it bent its head very low, so that just with the strength of his arms alone, the king could climb up onto its neck and back so that it could carry him up out of the rift from rock to rock back up to the forest floor. And this time, the king actually did say something to the Ibex. He was so perplexed, friend, I was going to kill you. That was the entire purpose why I came here. Why would you save me? He looked into the eyes of the Ibex, and it seemed at least as though it was saying to him, is allowing you to die the best way for me to show that I am strong. The king thought about this as he rode slowly home with his broken leg. He thought about it for a long time afterwards, alone in his throne room, until he made an announcement to the people of his country that he would no longer go out hunting anymore. Indeed, he forbade the practice of hunting as a sport in general throughout his lands. Only out of a need for food was it to be permitted. And when folks asked him, why have you given up this sport that you were very good at and that showed how strong and how powerful you are, oh great king. He said, he's killing other living things. The best way for me to show that I am strong. I invite you now into a time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains our community here and also supports the work of our outreach offering recipient. This week's offering will be shared with the NAACP of Dane County for more than a century. The NAACP has been one of the leading civil rights organizations in the United States. Its mission is to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination. The work of the NAACP's local Dane County branch includes youth programming, voting rights and workers advocacy and providing legal support to those seeking redress for racial discrimination. You will see on your screen you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You will see our text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. Last century, Dana McLean Greeley helped to form the bridge from the ancient past of our tradition to our faith as we practice it today. He was both the last president of the American Unitarian Association and the first president of the Unitarian Universalist Association. His time leading our movement was also bookended by two long ministries. The first was at Arlington Street Church in Boston. The church first built to accommodate the large crowds who came to hear the preaching of William Ellery Channing, the father of American Unitarianism. And his final ministry was with the First Parish Church in Concord, once the home congregation of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Those are arguably the two most important of our movement's pulpits in the neighborhood of Boston. I say arguably because I am confident that the good folks at Arlington Street and in Concord would agree that they are together the top two, but I am equally confident that they would dispute as to which was number one and which was number two. I share all of this background only to help you understand that Dana was a pivotal leader in our faith for some 50 years of his life, not just regionally, but nationally and even internationally. In the course of his work, he met an uncountable number of people. I do not know the Reverend Dr. Greeley. He died the same year I entered elementary school, but according to the reports of those who did know him, he was terrible at remembering people's names. It was simply not a gift that he had, and obviously it was a faculty that came up quite a bit in his line of work. So the story goes that he had a method which he used consistently enough to be remembered for. Recognizing that he ought to know the person in front of him, he would acknowledge this and say something like, now I know you and work with a visible effort, trying to draw up a name that nine times out of 10, he was never going to come up with. Now maybe after a short time, maybe after a long time, fixed with that hard working face of his, just about anyone would eventually prompt him by saying their name. Reverend Greeley, I'm so and so and I know you from such and such. To which Dana would respond with a bolt of grateful recognition and with all the warmth of his rich Boston accent declare, of course you are. Our liberal religious tradition is often criticized, and not entirely unfairly, as being overly individualistic, emphasizing personal value and freedom at the expense of the values of the communal and collective. But it is not as though we have no basis for cherishing community in our theological history. Just as an example, let me quote to you the man who, perhaps more than any other, defined what unitarian universalism would mean, at least for the first decade after it came into being in 1961. Here are some words from Dana McLean Greeley. There is a stage in human development when people begin to be as much interested in others as in themselves, as much concerned about the other's lots as about their own. When this stage of development is reached by some miraculous transition, the word we, expressive of sympathy and of the sense of togetherness in life, takes the place of the word I. The word we unites us. The word I divides us. I am important in a liberal philosophy. There is no doubt about that, but without my relationships, I am nothing. The people I love, the people I serve, the people who work with me and with whom I work. So we are much more important than I am. Now I means one and we means more than one. But how many people can fit into a we? There is a scientific theory that answers that question or at least attempts to. It's a concept in evolutionary psychology called Dunbar's Number, which gets its name from Dr. Robin Dunbar, who first proposed the idea of it. It comes originally from studies of social group size among various non-human primates and studying the apparent relationship between the average group size for a species and their average brain size. Dunbar applied this as a formula to the average brain size for another type of primate. Plus, this is how he arrived at a figure for roughly how many other people, human beings, can keep track of socially at a given time. His informal explanation is that this means the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar. Although the math behind it is more complicated than this and the whole thing rests on averages rather than exact specific figures, Dunbar's Number is usually given as 150. This is the finite limit of our social capacity as human beings, so the theory goes. Niki Giovanni, a poet of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 70s who is still writing today, wrote in her poem about friendship, a poem of friendship. We are not lovers because of the love we make but the love we have. We are not friends because of the laughs we spend but the tears we save. I don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak. I will never miss you because of what we do but what we are together, not because of what we do but what we are together. The deep intimacy of true friendship is so precious because for most of us it is so rare. We rightly value knowing and being known by others but because that level of depth isn't something we can share with everyone, we have to be able to reach beyond it, wider, in order to find empathy for and solidarity with the great many strangers who share our planet. The author and humorist, Jason Parjan, offers a more evocative term for Dunbar's Number, the monkey sphere. Picture a giant ball made up of monkeys all huddled together. Those are the other monkeys you feel some natural connection with or affinity for. All of the other monkeys outside of that sphere, nearly all of the monkeys in the world are much more abstract. Taking to heart that they have names and stories and thoughts and feelings and are just as real as the monkeys you already know, that's not always easy. Now the idea that we can put a universal number on our capacity for relating to other people may not sit very well with you. And to be honest, it doesn't sit well with me either. My observation about myself and other people is that there is a wide, wide variation in how many meaningful relationships we are capable of building and maintaining at a time. For instance, maybe you know someone who just seems to know everybody, not just their names, but their stories, the things that matter to them, who really makes everyone around them feel seen that's an incredible gift. And I am in awe of the folks who have it. Dolly, how you doing? That's at one extreme end. And on the other, there are folks who are truly reclusive or live with severe social anxiety and might have very, very few real relationships to other people. 150 might be the perfect middle of that spectrum. It seems impossible to me to say with any real confidence one way or another. But I think the really important thing about the monkey sphere, about Dunbar's number, is not the particular number itself, but the insight that we all have some internal limit on the number of stable social connections that we can maintain. Even if that limit is not quite perfectly knowable and different for each one of us. It's a reminder to me that we can't overcome our own bias or prejudice or the limits of our own experience simply by knowing enough people. The world is always going to be made up almost entirely of people we don't know. Instead, we're going to practice compassion towards others on a scale beyond our immediate circle. If we're going to be serious about the religious ideas that every person is intrinsically worthwhile and that our fates are all bound up with each other, we need tools and strategies for connecting even without knowing. Not just going from I to we, but to build overlapping and intersecting we's that transcend our common social limits. One such tool can be the religious congregation. The single place in my life where Dunbar's number makes the most sense to me is religious community. The National Corrigations Study published in 2012 found that the average American congregation had 70 regular participants. People who study religious communities will tell you that the most challenging transition in which many congregations get stuck and most do not get passed is the growth in members from less than 100 to more than 200. Notice that's the point at which you cross Dunbar's number. A congregation below that threshold can still think of itself as something of an extended family and at least hold onto the illusion that everybody knows everybody else. But crossing that point requires that single group identity to become a group of groups. One we made up of several smaller we's and key to holding that great big super we together over time is that the smaller we's have to continuously overlap and shift around. If they stop circulating, if the relationships connecting different people in different subgroups break down, then those we's end up fracturing and breaking apart. Our congregation, you are probably aware, left Dunbar's number back in the dust quite a while ago. Although if you go back to the days of the stone haulers and the construction of the meeting house, my understanding is that the active membership wasn't too far off of that range. And besides, the rare and wondrous gift of a person who can manage to know seemingly everyone at once, what holds a community together is the quality of our connections to each other, especially those connections that bridge gaps of age or interest or time in membership or any other sort of difference that might divide two separate we's under other circumstances. Last week, Kelly Crocker spoke to us about the healthy congregation team and their new role in helping us all to tend to the quality of our connections. They are a terrific group of people who have leaned forward to play a critical role in helping us navigate places of tension and conflict. But, and, all of us have a role to play not just in moments of crisis or difficulty, but in the most regular of circumstances. When we meet someone new here or new to us or who isn't exactly new to us but we haven't got their names down yet so they still feel kind of new to us, I'm gonna ask you to do something in all of those circumstances to help us draw our circle even wider, both to better understand and appreciate the folks we are already here with and to open ourselves up to welcome in new faces and voices so that everyone who needs a place here can find a place here. It's a simple discipline. One you've likely heard before if whatever pandemic binge watching you did included the program Ted Lasso. Be curious, not judgmental. Now on the show during a moving monologue in the middle of a game of darts Ted attributes this phrase to Walt Whitman, the great Unitarian poet. Whitman didn't actually say it but it is so well matched to our tradition I'm not even going to complain about the misattribution. Be curious, not judgmental. When Dana Greeley couldn't remember someone's name he engaged his curiosity about them. He showed them that if he couldn't remember it wasn't because he wasn't interested. And when they provided the personal revelation that he couldn't get to on his own he affirmed the truth of who they were. Of course you are. I offer this to you friends. In a congregation like ours everybody will not always know everybody else with certain rare exceptions. But its strength and power is grounded in large part in how we are curious about one another and ready and eager to affirm the people we encounter through our curiosity. I leave you with these words from the poet, novelist, feminist, Marxist and Jew, Marge Pearson, who writes about how vulnerable and fragile the eye is in the face of injustice and how powerful the we may grow to become. What can they do to you? Whatever they want. They can set you up, they can bust you, they can break your fingers, they can burn your brain with electricity, blur you with drugs till you can't walk, can't remember. They can take your child, wall up your lover. They can do anything you can't stop them from doing. How can you stop them? Alone you can fight, you can refuse, you can take what revenge you can but they roll over you. But two people fighting back to back can cut through a mob, a snake dancing file can break a cordon, an army can meet an army. Two people can keep each other sane, can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, sex. Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge. With four you can play bridge and start an organization. With six you can rent a whole house, eat pie for dinner with no seconds and hold a fundraising party. A dozen make a demonstration, a hundred fill a hall, a thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter, 10,000, power and your own paper. A hundred thousand your own media, 10 million your own country. It goes on one at a time. It starts when you care to act, it starts when you do it again and they said no and it starts when you say we and know what you mean and each day mean one more. We gather each week the hurts and hopes of recent days written on our hearts. We share all these here in a spirit of acceptance and support. This week we light a candle for Aidan Egan, grandson of Pat and Lloyd Egan, son of Brendan and Kinnick Egan, who had his appendix removed last night at Children's Hospital. He will be there for a couple more days and we send Aidan and his family, our strength and our hopes for healing and a very quick recovery. Will you join me now in a moment of meditation? We take a moment now to pause in the stillness to rest, to quiet ourselves so that we can feel what stirs within. We light a candle in gratitude for this breath, knowing that each breath draws us closer to the pulse of life and with each exhalation, we make room for something new. We light a candle for compassion. May we find in this day the comfort of those who care. May we encounter patience along our growing edges and compassion in our most tender spots. We light a candle for inspiration and encouragement. May we find what we need to face our challenges and nurture ourselves. We light a candle for all who are suffering. In the presence of suffering across the globe, may we redouble our efforts to practice kindness where we are with the hope that the light of our actions travels like the light to far away stars. May our gestures of compassion and generosity cede possibility. May we travel humbly with one another, choosing reconciliation over resentment as we try to live out these days in love. And we light one last candle for strength when life presses in and shifts us off balance. When pain assails us, when frustration mounts, may the rhythm of our breath steady us and bring us back to a place of gratitude. Blessed be and amen. Toward justice, go in courage, for together we have the strength to confront injustice in our daily lives and in the larger world. Go in love because a holy and generous love is both the reason and the means by which we transform our lives. Blessed be and go in peace.